The original Anomaly Warzone and follow-up Anomaly Korea were undeniably two of the best titles to come out on Android in the last few years. These games take the tower defense genre and turn it on its head by putting you in the control of the creeps. Under constant attack by defense towers, you have to repair, upgrade, and manage your units to reach the goal. It's much the same idea in the upcoming Anomaly 2, but you've got new units and some new gameplay mechanics to figure out.

With the slew of private label ODM / contracted OEM Android tablets on the market around the world, there are bound to be winners and losers. Coby, perhaps best-known for its cheap LCD TVs, made a big bet on the popularity of budget Android tablets over the last couple of years. The company had been pushing its budget slates on consumers since the end of 2010, reliably introducing more and more (...

It can be a pain to type on a virtual keyboard in a language that doesn't use Latin characters, but for the many speakers of Cantonese, Google is here to help. A new Cantonese input app has appeared in Google play to make typing in Cantonese a breeze. Well, maybe not a breeze, but that rhymes better than 'faster and more accurate.'

Google released a brand-new Places manager app on the Play Store today, allowing owners of Google Places pages to control and update their Places listings from any Android device quickly and easily. You can adjust things like hours, contact information, add photos, and even post updates that will show up on your business listing's Google+ page.

You can manage as many businesses as are linked to your Google account, though some businesses may not yet be compatible with the new manager, as the app's description notes.

You don't need to have one of those super hefty extended battery phones to burn through juice with wanton disregard for the future. All you need is a big honking external battery, and we found just the thing on sale today. The Anker Astro E4 is a 13,000mAh rechargeable cell that is usually only $44. That's a good deal, but for the next few days, it's down to $36.99.

The Anker Astro E4 weighs under 11oz and can charge most smartphones 5-6 times without needing to juice up itself.

The Google Offers app received its first significant refresh since June today with a modernized UI. Yep, you guessed it: sidebar nav and cards. At least Google really is sticking to that hamburger navigation / card layout paradigm, and Offers has finally been checked off the design to-do list.

The new version also brings supports for offline redemption of your offers, which is nice, but otherwise this update appears to be entirely visual in nature.

Star Command is one of my most-anticipated games for Android. Or at least it was, two years ago when it was scheduled to be released, and then again when it was released for iOS five months ago. An unreasonably long development cycle and some dodgy developer antics have made waiting for this game an exercise in frustration, and it's impossible to give it a full review without at least some bitterness hanging on in the back of my mind.

Last weekend, I finally got my own Google Glass unit. Since then I've been trying to adapt to using it and all its features, but as always there are a few things no Explorer can do just yet. With the update to XE10, the list of hidden or unimplemented features has changed dramatically. We've rifled through the build and picked out the gems we think are most worthy of discussion, including as yet invisible abilities within GlassVoice (as pointed out by our tipster Zhuowei) including 3D modeling, a stopwatch, panorama capture, and much more.

If you're someone who reads this blog but is still waiting for the cost of smartphone ownership to drop enough for you to get one (I used to be one of you, so I know you're out there), then newcomer Scratch Wireless might have something to say that will pique your interest. This company pitches itself as the world's first truly free mobile service, and it does this by relying first and foremost on Wi-Fi access for voice and data.

According to Google, less than one hundredth of a percent of apps out there are both malicious and capable of evading the built-in defenses in both Android and the Google Play Store. But if you really feel like you need a defense from that one-in-100,000 app, a trusted name in software protection has just entered the fray. Malwarebytes, makers of the popular eponymous Windows software, is now offering its services on Android.